Breaking down the silos

A couple of weeks ago, I had the great opportunity to be part of a panel discussion following the screening of a new documentary call FRESH here in Vancouver. I encourage everyone to see this film if you get the chance. There are no more screenings scheduled for Canada, but you can arrange to host one, or order a copy of the DVD for yourself. Here's what it's about:

FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet.

Among several main characters, FRESH features urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, the recipient of MacArthur’s 2008 Genius Award; sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, Joel Salatin, made famous by Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; and supermarket owner, David Ball, challenging our Wal-Mart dominated economy.

It's a fantastic film, and presents a really positive view of what is hopeful in the food system. Ana the director gets her point across while leaving the viewers with a sense that the food industrial complex is not the only way forward.

Not surprisingly, a lot of what came up in the film reminded me of the issues I'm trying to address in my thesis, and the quintessential farm imagery of the silo really triggered some thoughts. In the film, Iowa farmer George Naylor (of Omnivore's Dilemma fame) talks about how the natural cycles that sustained the farm for generations were broken when the silos were put up on his farm. In academia, this metaphor of silos is used to describe how we operate in disciplines that lose connection with reality by not communicating with one another. Scientists and academics love to pull out one little piece of a puzzle and study it in isolation, and then attempt to relate the findings back to the real world. Efforts for transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and crossdisciplinary research try to reconnect research to reality. In reality, this tends to be a lot of rhetoric because the Academy and all its associated institutions are set up to operate within disciplines, or silos if you will.

To bring this back to the food issue, the silos on farms across North America are a fantastic representation of the way we have distanced ourselves from our food. This separation - of food from nature, of people from food, of farming from community - is my hypothesis of what is wrong in food around the world. It can be connected to issues of hunger, nutrition, obesity, social structures, and the list could go on. By putting grain into silos, we lose sight of it. When we lose sight of something, we lose control over it. When we lose control, we lose knowledge of what is really happening. When we lose knowledge, we lose any sense of real choice. The silos represent the start of wide scale industrialization, standardization, commodization, professionalization*, .....ization, ....., that contribute to a loss of food culture and the sense that our environment is something 'other' than ourselves.

We put food into silos and forgot where it came from. Everything changed in the way we eat once those silos went up, and as a society we didn't notice. The power over what's to eat shifted away from the farmers who grow the food to the corporations who sell it. They try to control nature by industrial agriculture and our diet by mass processing and marketing. When we put up silos, whether literally or figuratively, we distance ourselves from the natural world, and we aren't going to figure things out until we break them down. That's why we need the heroes, visionaries, and activists - those people in FRESH, and the ones I've been working with for my thesis - to drive this movement to help us reconnect, remember, and rebuild our cultural, ecological, and social connection to food.
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*By professionalization, I'm referring to the way we have passed authority over knowing what to eat to medical professionals who offer dietary guidelines that are so complex that nobody knows what to eat any more without professional advice. These guidelines are a victim of scientific reductionism and are based on nutrients and not foods, and arguably, further separate us from what we eat.
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